An Ark of Light

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘There’s a pub called Furlong’s in Curracloe that is my local grocery store. Mr Furlong always puts on the television on Saturday afternoons. Normally it’s horse racing but I’m sure RTÉ will be showing the Olympics instead, especially after all that’s happened in Munich. We’ll walk down after lunch. Mrs Furlong would love to meet you. I told her you’d be visiting. You’re all I’ve talked about for the past fortnight. Would you like that?’

  Alex looked up and squeezed her hand. ‘I’d love it. Can we go by the beach?’

  ‘Yes, but let’s eat first.’

  Eva intended to make up a proper plate of lunch for her granddaughter, but instead they remained sitting on the window seat, chatting and snacking on whatever food was on the small table. It felt like a picnic indoors. Alex wanted to see every photograph that had survived Eva’s numerous moves. Eva dug out dusty old albums of Hazel as a girl in Glanmire Wood, standing proudly beside her pony and even older photo albums from Eva’s own girlhood: Eva and her brothers wearing such old-fashioned bathing costumes that they made Alex laugh. She stared at photos of her great uncle Brendan at the same age as she was now, smiling down from a hayrick in a comically wide-brimmed hat, and at a battered sketchbook in which Eva had recorded family gathering in delicate line drawings that had barely faded after more than half a century.

  Although Alex admired these sketches, she continually went back to the albums featuring Hazel as a child, to scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings about Hazel winning prizes at horse shows and photos of her setting out from Frankfort Avenue with joyous optimism on her wedding morning. Alex didn’t cry when examining these photos and neither did Eva. Instead they spoke simply about the woman they had both loved; sharing anecdotes which conjured up such a sense of the absence that bound them together, that Eva half-expected to feel Hazel’s hand on her shoulder, like on the evening when Hazel had gazed down on them sitting together in a remote lodge in Mount Elgon National Park. The photographs that Alex studied most were those of Hazel at her own age, as if desperate to gain a sense of her mother as a child. Eva tried to convey Hazel’s essence, but realised how she lacked the words to capture her effervescence and vivacity at that young age.

  At two o’clock they put on their coats, collecting shells and coloured stones during their walk along the deserted beach to reach the small cluster of shops. Furlong’s pub was empty, apart from two elderly farmers drinking slow half pints at the counter, who nodded to them with silent but hospitable reticence. The television was on, showing coverage from Munich. Eva had only previously been in the grocery section of this shop, partitioned off by a small door. But now she ordered two minerals from Mr Furlong and they sat on high stools at the counter to await the steeplechase. Alex was saying how her new friends at school envied her because the Kenyan athletes were so good. She found it strange that classmates regarded her as Kenyan, whereas people in Kenya always called her Irish. There was a delay before the steeplechase final and the coverage switched from the stadium over to the Olympic Sports Hall where a gymnastics competition was occurring. Mr Furlong called in his wife from the kitchen and even the two old farmers halted their muffled conversation to stare at the television. The tiny gymnast who walked onto the floor area looked younger than Alex, and barely old enough to be a spectator let alone an athletic. But a quality within her caused a ripple among the crowd, with an echo of that same anticipation pervading the pub. It was impossible not to watch this girl stand there, poised and awaiting the music, without fearing for her and wondering how such a waif-like imp could perform before a vast audience.

  ‘Who is this?’ Eva asked.

  ‘Olga Korbut,’ Alex said. ‘All the girls say she was cheated out of a gold medal in the asymmetric bars. Even the crowd booed the result. Just watch her, she’s marvellous.’

  Olga Korbut was indeed marvellous. As the music started the tiny gymnast came to life with a leap that defied gravity. She turned and somersaulted, coiling her body into extraordinary postures that she lithely sprang out of to bound across the floor, performing an impossible succession of cartwheels and twists. She landed perfectly, within an inch of the white line, and fell backwards, subtle and languid, holding the crowd, this tiny pub and – Eva suspected – the watching world fixated in the palm of her hand, as she momentarily paused, prior to commencing the second half of her floor exercise. Eva was transfixed, not just by this sight but by a memory that came unbidden of another spellbinding figure thirty years ago. She urgently tapped Alex’s shoulder.

  ‘You asked me earlier what your mother was like as a girl. Well, that’s Hazel up there on the television. Oh, I don’t mean the same petite figure, but the same boundless joyous energy. I remember one afternoon during the war, Hazel began to blow bubbles from a jar on the daffodil lawn in front of Glanmire House, twisting her body this way and that, totally immersed in the magic of what she was doing. She knew she was magical in that moment and all of us watching – Francis, myself, Maureen the maid, even the barking dog dancing around her – knew she had turned the moment into magic too. Your mother radiated magic just like Olga Korbut.’

  Alex made no reply but Eva sensed the renewed intensity with which she watched the television as the gymnast sprang into action once again. The bell over the door jangled as another customer entered and stopped, sensing the atmosphere. Nobody spoke in Furlong’s pub until, with a final impetuous sequence of tumbles and falls, the young gymnast halted on the last note: her head tilted back, her figure utterly still except for an irrepressible smile that grew as the crowd applauded. Even the two black-coated farmers at the counter began to clap, shaking their heads in wonderment. Alex applauded so loudly that Eva feared she would fall off the stool. Mrs Furlong reached down to the shelves under the counter and presented Eva and Alex with two complimentary bottles of lukewarm lemonade.

  ‘Seeing as this is a special occasion, Mrs Fitzgerald. This must be the granddaughter you were telling us about.’

  ‘It is indeed,’ Eva explained. ‘I brought her in because she wants to see the men’s steeplechase race. There’s a Kenyan runner, you see…’

  ‘Two Kenyan runners,’ Alex said. ‘Benjamin Jipcho is running as well.’

  ‘And have you come all the way from Kenya?’ the woman asked. ‘What a journey for a girl of your age. I’ve a brother a priest over there in the missions, teaching at St Patrick’s High School in a place named Iten in the Rift Valley Province. Father O’Leary is his name. Would you have come across him at all? He’s always saying how the young lads at his school are fierce runners, pounding out the miles on dusty roads, barefoot and all.’

  By now Alex had everyone’s attention: even the two old farmers who began to shyly ask questions and marvel at the scale of her father’s plantation and the enormous size to which crops grew in Kenya. Eva felt inexpressibly proud at how well Alex answered each query. By the time the steeplechase began, the two farmers were shouting encouragement at the screen, as if Kipchoge Keino was a local lad, born and raised in Kilmuckridge, and Benjamin Jipcho had grown up playing hurling with their grandsons. More afternoon drinkers drifted in and got caught up in the race: a huge roar going up when the Kenyans sauntered home for gold and silver medals. After four hours in Curracloe, Alex was already famous. Everyone offered congratulations, insisting on shaking Alex’s hand as they left the pub.

  Grandmother and granddaughter dawdled for hours on their walk home. They encountered a stray dog on the strand holding a stick that Alex repeatedly threw into the water for him to fetch. The child screamed with delighted laughter, trying to dodge the seawater spray each time the dog vigorously shook himself when racing back to her with the stick. After the dog got tired and bounded off, they chatted to two fishermen digging for bait and spent twenty minutes patting a donkey tormented by flies, who was gazing out over a five-barred gate leading into a field that overlooked the strand. Sharing secrets never to be revealed to anyone else, they linked hands and walked along the darkening strand. Eva could not recall
a more idyllic day since the mornings when she used to set off for day-long picnics as a girl in Donegal.

  The cats were out hunting for prey when they returned to the caravan, or The Ark, as Alex reminded Eva. The field was deserted, with no light of any house within sight. They lit candles wedged into the two candlesticks, which were all that remained of the Fitzgerald family silver. The world outside felt hugely distant. Inside this tiny ark they needed for no one else and for nothing else as they made up Alex’s bed, delighted when Queensly jumped down through the open skylight to settle herself at the end of the blankets so that she could curl up at Alex’s feet while she slept.

  Eva did not set an alarm clock. They would rise whenever they wished and have the whole of Sunday morning and afternoon to themselves before the train journey to Dublin. They would have all this and many more weekends to come. Eva would lose her granddaughter each summer when school ended and Alex re-joined her father in Kenya, but for the next five years the child would return to Park House School every September. Once again Eva felt part of the cycle of life, with a purpose to live for. To watch Alex grow into a beautiful, intelligent and confident young woman and to one day possibly even hold a great grandchild in her arms. Such hopes belonged to the distant future. For now it was enough that they were both safe in this Ark amid the fields, briefly lying awake to savour how the caravan gently rocked in the tides of the wind before they closed their eyes to succumb to dreams about all their tomorrows to come.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Winter

  Turlough, Co. Mayo, 1974

  The driver of the tow truck was unsure if he would make it up the overgrown woodland avenue to her former home. Luckily the day was so cold that last night’s frost had not fully thawed. It was setting in hard again as dusk approached. So although the wheels churned up ugly tyre marks from the grassy avenue, the truck had not yet become stuck. A branch broke off an overhanging tree, leaving yet another long scratch mark along the side of the caravan the truck was towing. Walking behind it, in her seventy-second year, Eva threw the branch into the undergrowth. This second-hand caravan and these few acres of woodland were the last two things she owned. Glanmire Wood had grown neglected during the three decades since anyone last lived here. Fences were broken, damage caused by cattle wandering in and farmers freely helping themselves to fencing stakes. The woods were silent in this November twilight. This quietude, unbroken even by the cry of a solitary bird, made the engine sound even louder as the driver switched gear, preparing for a particularly steep bend ahead.

  This was the third time in fifty years that Eva had arrived to make her home in Glanmire Wood. On the first occasion in 1927 she was a young bride, unwisely marrying into a family who still expected locals to lift their caps and step off the road whenever a Fitzgerald motor car passed. These woods were rarely silent back then, with Freddie loving to stalk through them clutching his Holland ejector twelve-bore gun. Drink took possession of him here in equal proportion to how loneliness took possession of her, with few paying guests, two small children and the county bailiffs drinking in Durcan’s bar for Dutch courage before venturing cautiously up this avenue to serve writs on them. Their hesitancy had partly related to the four hundred years’ residency of the Fitzgeralds and partly to the twelve-bore gauge of Freddie’s Holland ejector. Those rooms had been freezing on the second occasion Eva came home here: a winter’s night in 1939 as cold as this one, the war allowing her to run away from a faltering marriage to hide in these wood, with her children and their young maid, Maureen.

  But tonight, thirty-five years later, as she returned for the third time, Eva was running away from nothing. She was only returning because this wood was the last place left from which nobody could evict her. When Freddie disinherited them all, he could never have expected his estranged wife to eventually inherit this wood, and certainly not in the way it had now come into her possession. Glanmire Wood finally belonged to her, but at an unbearable price. Eva doubted if she would ever feel warm again or experience hunger or any sensation except numbness. Since receiving the news from Kenya two months ago she rarely bothered to light the small stove in her caravan. Whenever she remembered to do so it was only for the sake of the three cats who had found their way into The Ark as strays. Her malaise had perturbed the two younger cats, who incessantly rubbed against her legs, wanting Eva to stroke them. But Eva had spent most of the past two months sitting motionless indoors in the small caravan park at Curracloe, only venturing forth to buy cat food. When news of the tragedy spread, local people started to bring her beef stews, possessing no understanding of what a vegan ate and imagining that she only abstained from meat because of poverty.

  Old married couples like Mr and Mrs Furlong had shyly appeared in the muddy field when nobody else was around, pleading with her to take some nourishment. They talked about how isolated she must feel in that makeshift caravan park where she was the sole occupant in winter. These neighbours meant well, and, after they left, her cats feasted on the meat stews, while she broke up the proffered cakes to scatter as crumbs for the small birds who flocked around her home.

  A caravan park was an odd place to call home, but Eva lost track of the places she had called home since the morning in 1949 when she left Freddie standing watching her from the doorway of Glanmire House. Home had been a succession of cheap pensions in Tangiers and rented rooms in Spanish villages, where her dream of becoming a writer faded. It had been an attic flat in London when forced to bear witness to her son’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane; a Lundy Island cottage on the day she received news of Hazel’s death. But Eva never had a proper home since the Frankfort Avenue house, until the morning when Alex christened this caravan The Ark. It was not just Alex’s act of naming for it which transformed it into a true home, but her youth and love and vitality when it was a dwelling to be shared by her granddaughter on any weekend when the child wanted to escape from boarding school.

  The only person who did not call to see her in Wexford in recent weeks was the farmer who owned the field where the caravans were parked, a man who wanted rid of Eva so he could rent her berth for more money to some rich Dublin family who would only bother to turn up on summer weekends. For over a year Eva had resisted his unsubtle hints for her to leave because it felt important to stay parked within reach of Alex’s school. But that Wexford field held too many memories now. She was surprised by how the most unlikely neighbours called into her when news spread that she had hired this truck to transport her to Mayo: people with whom she had previously only exchanged a few words when proudly wandering with Alex along Curracloe Beach, or when she spent last year walking around the small lanes in search of her tomcat, Martin Buber, after he ventured out on a night hunt and never returned.

  The tow truck slowed to a halt now, blocking the avenue. Eva picked her way carefully around to the cab door, which opened.

  ‘There’s a chestnut tree overhanging the path,’ the driver explained. ‘I just might be able to swing around it.’

  Eva walked past the truck and onto the daffodil lawn where she had scattered Francis’s ashes eight years ago. The boarded-up house looked to be in the same condition as when she came here last spring on a day trip with Alex to show the child where her mother was born. However, the sun had been shining on that day, wildflowers in bloom. Eva sat on the front step to watch the man manoeuvre past the chestnut tree and park her caravan in front of the ivy-covered, boarded-up main door. He switched off his engine, climbed down and looked around, concerned.

  ‘Is this really where you want it, Mrs Fitzgerald?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can swing it around to the side if that would make it easier for you to run a water pipe from the kitchen.’ He paused. ‘I mean you have a water supply, don’t you?’

  ‘There used to be one decades ago.’

  ‘How will you survive without water?’

  This man thinks I am demented, Eva thought, a lost old bird who should be kept in a cage. ‘Survi
val is the one thing I’m good at. The poor cats will be terrified. You might lift down their baskets.’

  The driver went to say something and then changed his mind. He released the three cats, who ran around the lawn in great circles after their confinement. The oldest, Queensly, glared reproachfully at Eva and refused to let the old woman come near. The driver put concrete blocks in place to stabilise the caravan and Eva climbed inside. Her books had been packed into boxes for the move, the crockery carefully wrapped up. The cats would be starving and she needed to feed them. The responsibility for their care was the only thing keeping her going. She called their names at the door but they refused to respond, still having not forgiven her. The noise of the spoon against their bowl brought them scurrying in, however, ill-tempered after their long confinement. They pushed each other greedily aside as they ate. Dusk had settled in. She went out to the driver who was putting down additional concrete blocks to serve as steps up to her door. He would be anxious to get his truck back down the avenue before all daylight was gone.

  ‘You’ve a long journey ahead,’ she said.

  ‘Sure haven’t I the radio for company,’ He looked around him at the darkening trees. ‘This is a lonely spot. Is there anything more I can do for you?’

  ‘No. You’ve been really kind.’

  ‘Does anyone know you’re here? You’re very isolated in this wood. In Wexford they said you were some class of artist or was it a writer? Nobody seemed quite sure.’

  ‘I was never quite sure myself.’

  The man opened the cab door and climbed up. ‘Whatever you are, Mrs Fitzgerald, I wish you happiness.’